Monday, November 5, 2012

The Honey Boo Boo Standard

I am sure we have all heard the word, "No" from each one of our kids. I will admit, when they say it, and you know they understand it's meaning, it is a shocker. How do we, as parents, guide our kids into understanding the child/parent role these days? I feel that we as parents have created a generation of kids who feel the world revolves around them. Our ability to find moderation in how much we give to and protect our kids and how much we allow them to learn and suffer has been swung from one end of the pendlem to the other.

Back in the early days, our parent's days, kids feared their parents. Spanking and using the belt were not frowned upon as it is today. Kids respected their teachers, and were even punished by them. My own father was smacked in the hand with a ruler every time he wrote left handed (as they thought is was a learning defect) So now he writes right-handed, but does everything else left-handed. Parents ruled with an iron fist....

....And today, kids, by and large, are allowed to defy their parents, their teachers and bulling is at an all-time-high. Kids are lazy and full of themselves. They feel that the world will provide for them without having to lift a finger. Parents are quick to give and slow to punish. Just look at what is on TV today. Honey Boo Boo, for example is what we watch. According to the New York Times, Honey Boo Boo has 2.7 million viewers! http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/honey-boo-boo-has-the-ratings-if-not-the-critics/

This just drives me crazy.

How can we, as a society, put up with this? Filling our time with selfish brats on TV has become one of America's favorite past-times. And our kids are watching.

My little Lia, picks up on everything. Being gifted, she has a photographic memory. Her little brain remembers EVERYTHING. This is, of course, both good and bad. But just for her sake alone, I have to be super careful every time I turn the TV on. She follows and emulates anything she sees. This is one of my greatest challenges with raising a gifted child. Her defiance of what we are trying to teach her creates havoc in our home. This was said about gifted children and defiance,

"But for the gifted child, this quality can often go beyond that of standing firm on her own convictions, or a habit of simple disobedience, because her thought processes function so much differently from others. She will look at a problem from several different angles all at once, and because she thinks in a fairly mature and complex way, she will feel that her decisions are well thought out and, necessarily, right. The gifted child will not stop challenging after a few times, but will remain obsessed with fairness, with logic, with their own feelings at that moment in time, which are neither developed nor mature enough to be trusted." http://www.christianity.com/1229632/ says:
I hope for the sake of all of my children, our society will start to see the issue there is with this kind of indulgence, even if all we do is turn the TV off. Our kids are watching. They are testing our weaknesses. I hope that we can find a middle ground where kids respect adults, not out of fear, but because we love them enough to not give them everything they want.

Here is just a clip from it:"Psychiatrists are now saying that over-indulging kids is actually a form of child neglect.Over-indulgent parents give their kids too much of everything — money, automobiles, material goods, freedom, adult privileges.The last one is perhaps the most interesting.Teenagers, in particular, have come to demand their freedoms without any strings attached. In other words, “What can you do for me and forget you.”'

What will our world be if we are run by people who feel this way?

I pray we can help our kids by not giving them everything they want. I pray that we can raise the generation that was taught with moderation in all things. I hope our kids learn how to work and how to love, how to save and how to give. It is up to us as parents to change who our kids will be.

Oh man, I couldn't agree with you more! Like it mentions in the article, I think a lot of parents are more concerned with being a "cool" parent, and their kids liking them, than doing what is actually best for the child. I nannied for years, have baby-sat a ton of kids, worked at a daycare, and without fail, I could ALWAYS tell which kids had parents who let them do whatever they want, and didn't set boundaries. Unfortunately it wasn't until growing up that I was able to appreciate my "strict" parents and all of their rules. :)